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Show PAGE 11 THE ZEPHYRJULY 1995 Marie Ogden came here from New York or Florida, or maybe both, and she started this religious organization and supposedly had visions. Anybody who joined her organization had to give her all their worldly possessions and then they came to live with her. They lived like communists, but it wasn't a communist belief, it was a religious belief. She saw in her vision that the desert would tum green and the fertile fields would tum to desert. So she was looking for a vast desert and she found it. When we went down there, one of her people had just died and she wouldn't bury her. At the time there was no burial law, just a sanitary law. I remember our Doc Allen was sent down there to check it out, and he said the longer he looked at that woman, the more alive she became. She was perfectly embalmed and under the sanitation law there was nothing to do but let her keep it. And why wouldn't Marie bury the body? we went. We were there until the last year of the war and the project was winding down, so we transferred to San Frandsco. That's where I was for V-- J Day which was pretty exdting. And then I came home where I met Hub at the Hole n' the Rock. But you didn't know Hub before then. No. Moab kids were pretty wild. My parents made them and we couldn't I date them. But married one. He was a good friend of Donna Loveridge and her husband had grown up in Moab too. So he used to come up to see them all the time and I just managed to capture him. off-lim- its NEXT MONTH: Maxine remembers uranium, boom days in Moab, and Charlie Steen. Marie Ogden's home at the Home of Truth. Maxine Newell at home. June 1995. She thought the woman was going to come back to life. Finally, the story is, they gathered a lot of sagebrush and cremated the body. Marie said the woman didn't want to come back and live with her husband anymore; she preferred to move on. And you got to know Marie Ogden? Oh yes. For years she ran the San Juan Record and my dad had the grocery store, so we knew her. During the war years, when I was roaming around the country, 1 would write home with descriptions of the places I had been, and Marie would publish it in She the paper. She was a very nice old lady, quite pretty and always home died in in ten the years ago. finally Blanding, maybe nursing Who were your first friends in Moab? Well, my husband. He had just returned from the war. I met him at the Hole n' the Rock. It used to be a restaurant. Albert Christensen and his brother Leo built it. They had a dance hall and a restaurant, and it was really the only honkytonk anywhere nearby. There was nothing like it in Monticcllo or Moab, so we'd all congregate and meet down there. It was in San Juan County and was too far away for the San Juan well-dresse- d. Calm Water Floats SLOW DOWN ; i I j "We are losing our sense of leisure. In a frenzy, we rush through the days and weeks, not Hole n' the Rock, about 1948. Sheriff to patrol, and Grand Cbunty wasn't interested because it was just another burden on them and it wasn't in Grand County anyway. So it became the wildest place and finally somebody got stabbed down there and they had to take away their beer license. And that's where 1 met my hushand Hub. Jumping back a bit, tell me about World War 1L 1 was living in Monticcllo and working in a government office there. I'd gone to college in Gunnison but came home on a vacation and got this job so I never went back to school. 1 took a civil service exam and received a notice that I'd been offered a job in the State Department. 1 had never been any farther from home than Salt Lake without my parents with me. So 1 got on a train and went to Washington, D.C. 1 was 20 years old and 1 stayed there a couple of years. Then 1 heard we were building a n Highway at the time. We thought that road to Alaska that they called the would be pretty exciting so another girl and I applied for the job and off to Edmonton Al-Ca- life but consuming it. Commercialism so dominates us that we are mere animated machines doomed to the slavery of goods and bonds and business. I do not have 'time' is the most frequently heard excuse for neglecting health, happiness, necessary recreation and even worship. Well, we had better take time or living time will take us!" A.P. Goutaey j |